Your special survey on Austria is an intriguing read (“The Sound of Success,” November 24, 2007). You manage to hit many key points, but you seem reluctant to connect some of them into a meaningful pattern. Now, in your issue only a fortnight ago you mentioned “the Habsburg club of countries, formerly of the Austro-Hungarian empire,” but your survey eschews such bold language. You do mention Austria’s extraordinary history, which ended in 1918 after six-hundred and forty years of Habsburg rule, when the country shriveled to its present borders, but you fail to see new Austria’s “imperial” ambitions in its current policies. The means have changed, as you duly point out: the country is now neutral to boot, and the biggest chunk of its economy is in financial intermediation, property, and services. The key here is precisely property, the main goal of Austrian banks that are spreading east at a clip. Although most of the denizens of the Habsburg club are pretty happy with all this, as their grandparents remember Austro-Hungarian empire with a dash of nostalgia, current Austrian policies nonetheless need to be called by their proper name: imperial, albeit with a lower-case “i.”